Yeah I think it’s because there’s so much less engagement here than on Reddit. The same toxic people would have been buried or down voted to hell over there, but here with far far fewer comments those toxic trolls will remain visible and take up a disproportionate amount of any comments section.
There’s also a selection bias thing going on, people who would get shadow banned or downvoted on Reddit find that they get engagement with their content here so stick around, the people who they put off will leave, which causes the toxicity ratio to go up and eventually the place will end up full of toxic commenters and posters. With a federated system this is an incredibly difficult problem to solve.
There’s some interesting musings on how this can affect the development of online spaces here which has stuck with me since I read it. eev.ee/blog/2016/07/22/on-a-technicality/
You also have a few things Reddit did or could do that you can’t really do on Lemmy. You also have, with a few exceptions, a rather new moderation team on Lemmy without the years of experience that some Reddit moderators had.
Outside of the mass defederation of any Nazi instances, Lemmy has been a lot weaker on overall moderation.
rab@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Man that blog post nails it I think. Lemmy is probably not going to grow much at all because yeah, all the normal people are chased away